by Steph Davis
Living out of Grandma’s Oldsmobile at Indian Creek, Utah
It wasn’t anything like what my parents had imagined for my future, and they were adamantly unsupportive of my unconventional, most likely dead-end, life choices. My brother was diligently laboring away in med school, though he had coincidentally discovered rock climbing at the same time. I was living out of the Oldsmobile in campgrounds in Yosemite, Moab, and Hueco Tanks, Texas, while scholarship offers to PhD programs and law schools piled up in my PO box. I was frankly terrified at my rebellious decisions, my parents’ unequivocal disapproval, and the feeling of speeding along a road to nowhere and beyond. But my urge to climb was stronger than my fear of becoming a bag lady. It was stronger than anything, and although I was almost as convinced as my parents that I was ruining my life, I found myself unable to step off the path once I’d stepped onto it. It was almost as if I didn’t have a choice.
I loved rock climbing, tying into a rope and heading up a vertical face, creating my own web of safety by placing different pieces of metal climbing gear into cracks, allowing the natural features of the stone to guide me. I quickly learned of the many different facets of climbing, from bouldering difficult moves a few feet off the ground with no equipment beyond a pair of rock shoes, to full expedition-style ascents of mountains and giant walls, which required months of time and every type of gear from tents to ice tools to thousands of feet of rope.
Then there was the purity and simplicity, and the seductive danger, of free soloing—climbing high off the ground without a rope. Within my first years as a climber, I chose easy climbs on clear, perfect days and set out alone to taste the freedom of moving over stone with pure freedom. No rope, no equipment, no partner, just the clean air and my hands and feet on the rock. It wasn’t something to do all the time or to an extreme, but it sometimes felt right, like trail running alone with all the time and space in the world to soak in the sky, the earth, my own breath, and my emotions. I relished the absolute focus of free soloing, knowing that every move I made counted more than anything else in the world at that moment.
Outer Limits, Yosemite Dean Fidelman
As much as I was drawn to increase my strength and skill on pure climbing difficulty, I was also attracted to the complex knowledge needed for bigger climbs. I spent winter months living in Hueco Tanks, the best bouldering area in the States, where I threw myself again and again at difficult moves never more than fifteen feet off the ground, and the summers in Yosemite or Colorado, learning how to work with the full gamut of climbing gear and big wall techniques on multipitch routes up long granite faces.
I came to love the Longs Peak Diamond, in Estes Park, Colorado, during these early years. Most people reach the summit of Longs on the Keyhole Route, a hiking trail that snakes up the mountain and around its west side. Though considered a “hiking” trail, the Keyhole is a serious endeavor. The rapid gain in altitude and the exposed scrambling make Longs Peak one of the more coveted fourteeners among the hiking/mountaineering crowd. The Diamond itself is the sheer wall on the east side of Longs, a thousand-foot face of granite that sits above a six-hundred-foot subwall called the North Chimney. For climbers willing to carry their equipment for three hours up to the glacier at the foot of North Chimney and take on more than a thousand feet of strenuous climbing at thirteen thousand feet, climbing the Diamond is an equally coveted outing. Once I’d learned how to lead up cracks and place protection gear, and how to manage ropes on several pitches of climbing in more user-friendly locations, the Diamond had become an irresistible dream.
The Longs Peak Diamond
I was twenty-two the first time I climbed the easiest route up the face, the Casual Route. I had a few years of rock-climbing experience, and none in the mountains, but I was with my friend Craig, an excellent and highly accomplished climber. The route’s name was somewhat misleading because any climb on the Diamond was not exactly casual, but since the rest of the routes became progressively even more difficult, the first ascensionists had dubbed it so with a wink and a nod. We left Fort Collins in the night, the standard protocol for avoiding afternoon lightning storms on the highly exposed face, and entered the dark forest for hours of quiet hiking up to the mountain.
The time slid by faster in the darkness as we made our way through the steep, canopied pine forest, and then the trees stopped abruptly and spat us out into the open night. Shooting stars dropped from the sky and I stumbled on the rocky trail, unable to keep my eyes on my feet. When the Diamond emerged through the dawn, still far away, it loomed bigger and steeper than any wall I’d ever seen, striking me with the physical force of a loud orchestral chord. That moment of awe stayed pressed forever into my mind, almost like a first childhood memory.
The “casual route” was a significant undertaking—requiring us to start our ascent at twelve thousand feet after the dark hours of hiking up, by climbing unroped together up the North Chimney. This climbing was not hard, but we had to ascend about six hundred feet of free solo terrain, watching out for loose or wet rocks through some surprisingly steep sections. We emerged on the top of the chimney onto Broadway Ledge—a sloping outcrop that splits the Diamond. On this sharply angled and deceptively meadowlike ledge, one could easily stumble on a loose rock or skid on an icy slab and tumble eight hundred feet to the glacier below, a tragic slip that had claimed more than one experienced climber.
Craig and I started climbing in a cold mist, the rough stone scraping my hands as we hurried up pitches of vertical crack climbing and face traversing up the sometimes slick granite. When the clouds lifted high on the route, I was dazzled by the vertical pink-and-gold granite. The gray, creased snowfields below seemed to lap against the walls like frozen waves. I felt vulnerable and small. But I liked the sense of urgency, of climbing on the edge. I struggled up chimneys, following behind Craig as he belayed me from above, fighting hard through the bulging crux section at the top of the wall, gasping for breath in the thin air.
When we topped out from the Diamond’s face at Table Ledge and scrambled up the final several hundred feet of easy terrain to the summit, we stood at about fourteen thousand feet, higher than I’d ever before been. The air was thinner, adding to the fatigue, and we had a long way to go down. But more than the exhaustion, I felt giddy and lighthearted, in love with this wall and this mountain and everything about it, the same infatuation I’d felt the very first day I went rock climbing with Kevin, back in Maryland.
We descended the north face of Longs, picking our way down and over talus and boulder fields, back to the steep, rocky trail we had come up in the dark. In daylight now I saw thick clumps of purple and white columbines, light-tipped pine shrubs, and granite steps of all colors. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been.
I was wiped out for days after the Diamond, and elated. I had never experienced a day so demanding. I wanted more. I wanted to master this kind of climbing and know that place closely. There was so much to learn.
For the next several summers, I spent many days on the Diamond, bivying at its foot like a pilgrim in a rock shelter below the North Chimney. I grew more comfortable with the environment and intimately familiar with the landscape—knowing the best water sources and descent routes, the exact feeling of each granite edge I grasped to climb up the North Chimney. The mandatory 3:00 a.m. alpine starts to get up and off the face and the summit before the regular summer-afternoon lightning storms became less painful, somehow satisfying.
I also met my future husband, Dean, high on the vertical face of the Diamond in those long-ago summer days. It was July and I was twelve hundred feet up on the wall when a climber appeared beside me on the route I’d climbed the day before. He moved quickly, with aggressive confidence, looking around somewhat wildly for the anchor. He was obviously a strong rock climber somewhat out of his element on this alpine wall, wearing tights, a hot-pink windbreaker, and an air of urgency. A little amused, I pointed up and left to the cluster of nylon slings about thirty feet away, and our
routes diverged. The next day we bumped into each other again at the local breakfast café down in town and decided to climb together the following week. We stayed up there for four days, each day climbing a harder route up the face, lying shoulder to shoulder in the small rock shelter every night. It was another beginning that would change everything.
In the spring and fall, I waited tables in Moab, Utah, a mecca of sandstone crack climbing and desert towers, living in the Oldsmobile while I saved my tip money for the next climbing season.
Moab was an easy place for a climber to get by. The unpretentious little town was sustained by tourism and outdoor recreation, from four-wheeling to river rafting, and it was rich in free camping spots along the Colorado River, where a girl living in a Cutlass Ciera could sleep quite happily. An easygoing, live-and-let-live atmosphere pervaded the community of locals, a mix of Moab natives, ranchers, artists, and outdoor folks. Every second I spent in the Utah desert reinforced my conviction that it was my destined home, a place that had everything I needed, including the opportunity to earn money in the restaurants to travel to other climbing dream destinations. Eventually I bought a rickety travel trailer, and my best friend, Lisa, let me park it in her large dirt driveway, just above Main Street.
Lisa, a six-foot-tall, blond bartender and wildlife biologist, was the heart of Moab’s climbing social scene. She lived surrounded by dogs, friends, and visitors, in a remodeled henhouse that she called the Bird Shack. Her door was literally always open, which meant there were typically at least three random climbers to be found on her couch at any time, sometimes to her chagrin. That’s where I met Fletch.
Lisa, the heart of Moab’s climbing scene
Fletch was mostly Heeler, though it was always fun to try to imagine what else she was. A lot of people thought she had some corgi, or some husky, or some Akita, or some beagle, or some coyote in her. She was a striking little tricolored res dog, from the Navajo lands in Arizona—the best, most beautiful, smartest dog in the world, in fact. Fletch was originally plucked from the Navajo res as a starving pup by the girlfriend of Jimmie Dunn, a famous desert climber. Betsy brought her to Moab, where, like all itinerant dogs and climbers, she was fostered briefly by Lisa, but was then gradually adopted by Lisa’s friend Scott. Scott always said if he ever got a dog, he wanted to name it after those Chevy Chase movies. Lisa christened her Betty M. Fletcher, to make it work, and everyone else called her Fletch.
I’d never had a dog before and wasn’t sure how I felt about them. I’d endured lots of barking, charging, lunch-stealing dogs at the crags, and I saw them as generally a nuisance. Scott was also living in Lisa’s driveway, in a travel trailer, but he was a hardworking construction man and inflexible about the moral imperative of disciplining a dog to be good and to mind. Fletcher gradually won my heart by being generally unobtrusive and impeccably behaved, thanks to Scott’s diligence. She was also uncannily intelligent and an excellent running/climbing companion. Before too long, I was sharing custody of Fletch with Scott, who was usually at a job site all day and happy to have me provide her with extra exercise and adventure. After about a year, he took off for a trip that started with an electrician contract in Antarctica, continued with freelance construction work in New Zealand, and had no fixed end date. Scott made me purchase Fletch for a dollar, so the deal would be made fair and square, and promise I’d never leash her unless it was for her own safety. Deciding to commit to such a responsibility was terrifying. But I already couldn’t imagine life without Fletch. I gave him two dollars.
The next season, I started working as a climbing guide in Moab instead of as a waitress and quite suddenly began to get a little financial support from a climbing-clothing manufacturer—the same one that would ultimately drop me over the phone many years later. I’d been putting my heart and soul into climbing for eight years, to the exclusion of anything else, and some of my climbs were getting noticed by the climbing world. Being a decent-looking girl was a plus, and pictures of me started to pop up in the small climbing magazines. The sponsorship pay was modest, to say the least, but it gave me the freedom to live in my car full-time and travel, my dream come true.
The next seasons brought trips to the Karakoram, Baffin, and Kyrgyzstan, and then to a time when I was obsessed with El Cap free climbing, spending my summers in Yosemite, living on a three-thousand-foot granite wall. Fletch would go off and stay with one of her many friends for a couple of months here and there when I left the country, rejoining me on my return in the pickup truck I’d bought used from a friend when the Olds finally died. We’d spend our days climbing and hiking and our nights cuddled together in the truck bed under a sleeping bag. Always a little solitary by nature, and increasingly isolated and consumed by my climbing drive, I grew deeply bonded to this intelligent little dog. We seemed to be able to read each other’s thoughts, and we had conversations. Fletch and I were more like partners or comrades than anything else, and before long we were two halves of a whole.
A proper home for two, the back of the Ford Ranger Eric Perlman
The wild guy I’d met that July on the Diamond entwined into my life too, though not nearly as smoothly as Fletch. Over the next twelve years, we traveled, split up, reunited, split up and reunited some more, got married, and then split up for good. But more than anything else, we climbed, with a devoted ferocity. We were both absolutely driven, intensely passionate, and impatient with anything that got in the way. For many winters we made the pilgrimage to hostile granite peaks in Argentine Patagonia, both together and apart, where the storms and the intensity of the mountains seemed to match our own tempestuous dynamic. In almost every way, we grew up together. Though we were puzzlingly incompatible, we seemed destined to travel on a parallel path through life, pushing and pulling, always connected by a stretched thread, always knowing we would come back together in the end. Until now.
Fletch and I moved into Just Rite immediately. I nested a little, splurging on some coffee cups and throw pillows at a Boulder thrift store, and put away my few clothes on the open shelves in the wall. It took just a few days to get used to waking up in the loft with blue sky above my face, stopping for a morning coffee in Boulder, driving out to the drop zone to make some skydives, and coming back to cook a simple meal. One evening I stood in the kitchen, stirring some kale in a frying pan as Fletch crunched her dinner in the glowing orange light, and realized that I felt content. Normal. Good. I smiled. I was in a strange place with no idea where I was going, and everything had changed. But I felt like me.
On the last day of July, I woke to the sound of the creek bubbling and birds chirping outside. I looked down at Fletch curled on her bed, propped up against a pillow, as light came through the windowpanes. It had been over a week and we were settled in. It was time I did a quick climb in Eldo. I slipped out with a pair of rock shoes strung to the cord of my chalk bag and walked up the dirt road to the park entrance. No one was in the entrance booth this early, and I walked the few hundred yards to the Bastille, the most famous rock formation in Eldorado Canyon. A crack-riddled buttress of unusually compact, slick sandstone, it started right off the edge of the dirt road above the creek. You could reach out and touch the first holds as you walked by. The Bastille Crack was the most classic route on this most famous rock tower. Though the climbing was close to vertical on the Bastille Crack, the good holds and plentiful cracks made it an enjoyable, relaxing free solo for locals and advanced climbers.
The canyon was empty and quiet at dawn, the air cool and fresh. I stepped off the ground, grasping the square, positive rock edges. I climbed slowly, carefully, as always when climbing without a rope. I relished the feeling of being in control of every muscle in my body, every thought in my head. I passed the first anchor and kept going, following the obvious path up the cracks that led me higher and higher. Physically, I was totally unfettered with no weight to carry—no harness, no slings, no carabiners, no rope. I didn’t have to stop to place gear into the rock and clip my rope into it. I was the li
ghtest I could be, not weighed down by any equipment. The climb took half the time it would with a partner, since I never had to belay someone else to me, and I could simply climb without stopping or messing with equipment. My mind followed my body, lifting into the freedom, the complete reliance on myself, all filling my entire being with good feelings. Two months ago, I’d been finding what could only be called relief, rather than pleasure, from climbing this way. In these weeks of skydiving and falling into a new life, I’d lost much of the weight I’d been carrying. I felt more at ease, simply happy at times. My natural buoyancy was returning. People were starting to comment again on how my wide smile mirrored Fletch’s. As I climbed, I felt no fear, no sadness, no ache, just a sense of lifting rightness.
Free soloing is often perceived as extreme or crazy. I’d always done it in a very careful way. My style was to solo as if I were going for a pleasant hike, never pulling through at-my-limit hard moves hundreds of feet off the ground without a rope. I’d seen people free solo like that, and I considered it reckless and not smart. If I went to a climb that was too close to my top climbing ability and started up it with no rope, I would certainly be hit by fear. I didn’t want to feel scared, my physical ability impaired by feelings of fear. I flatly drew the line at free soloing anything I considered at all difficult and would choose moderate, classic routes as my overall ability increased year after year. Rather than breezily sashaying up faces the way I would with a rope, I climbed with an extreme style of deliberate movement, each foot placement ultra-calculated, each handhold chosen with intention. I moved smoothly up the Bastille Crack and noticed again the unusual sensation I’d had since I’d started free soloing more and more in the last few months. I felt abnormally casual and almost fully relaxed, with no deep, inner voice keeping tabs on every movement I made. I’d been free soloing for fifteen years, but it had become completely different now. The difference was that the thought of falling held no fear for me. It wasn’t that I wanted to fall. I didn’t feel that black sense of half wanting it. That seemed to be over now. I truly didn’t want to fall. It was just that I wasn’t concerned about it. I didn’t have the slightest feeling of anxiety or doubt as I climbed. This unconcern and lack of fear made me feel truly free in a way I’d never experienced before. It felt delicious.